WND

Rebellion grows against Muslim indoctrination in schools

'At what point did you decide that it was OK to teach my children about Islam?'

Art Moore, co-author of the best-selling book "See Something, Say Nothing," entered the media world as a PR assistant for the Seattle Mariners and a correspondent covering pro and college sports for Associated Press Radio. He reported for a Chicago-area daily newspaper and was senior news writer for Christianity Today magazine and an editor for Worldwide Newsroom before joining WND shortly after 9/11. He earned a master's degree in communications from Wheaton College.

From coast to coast, parents are rebelling against what they describe as Islamic indoctrination of their children in public schools.

In Florida, for example, parents are protesting a newly approved textbook they say whitewashes Islam’s violent history of conquest and subjugation, while in San Diego, an angry father confronted the city’s school board about its partnership with the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations in an “anti-bullying” program.

The Brevard County School Board in Florida has revised a history textbook that had been condemned by some parents for its selective treatment of Islam, but the new edition still has its critics, reported WKMG-TV in Orlando. The board decided Tuesday night by a 5-0 voted to adopt the ninth-grade 2018 World History book published by Pearson Prentice Hall.

The local chapter of the activist group ACT for America pressed for the revision in an effort “to protect against indoctrination,” arguing the section about Islam ignored the religion’s “true history” and painted Muhammad and the treatment of women favorably.

ACT for America’s local leader, Roger Gangitano, told WKMG the new edition is an improvement, but the “problem remains that Islam is being portrayed in a far more favorable light than what would be 100 percent accurate,” with parents calling it partially “incorrect,” “incomplete” and “slanted.”

Nevertheless, Rasha Mubarak, Orlando Regional Coordinator of the Florida chapter of CAIR, entered the fray, asserting ACT is “using our students for their one intention and that is to push their anti-Islamic agenda.”

Meanwhile, in an initiative to “combat Islamophobia and the bullying of Muslims students,” the San Diego Unified School District, as WND reported, has formed a partnership with CAIR.

In a late April school board meeting, the Blaze reported, parent Christopher Wyrick confronted the San Diego school board about the Islamic instruction attached to the program and its relationship with the Islamic group.

Wyrick told the board he’s held “many titles” over the years, but “one of them I will not accept is ‘infidel.'”

“There has been an argument over the years to keep religious beliefs out of school, especially any that happen to be associated with Judaism or Christianity,” he said. “So at what point did you decide that it was OK to teach my children about Islam?”

He asked how the board could “justify spending our tax dollars on a program that’s meant to educate our kids on the Muslim religion specifically, yet only accounts for a very, very small portion of the harassment reported?”

He asked how CAIR, which has “ties to terrorists like Hamas,” could have an “ear on this board” and “implement its propaganda and hate speech into our schools in an effort to brainwash the minds of the young.”

Earlier in the meeting, Board Trustee Kevin Beiser said the Islam policy is a step toward protecting all children from bullying, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

“We will not allow Muslim students in San Diego schools to be spit on,” Beiser said.

The San Diego paper said he was shouted down by those in attendance.

“All students should be safe,” one person said, the Union-Tribune reported, and another added: “What about the Jews?”

‘The true faith, Islam’

Last week, a Groesbeck, Texas, couple moved their sixth-grade daughter to a new school after they discovered her history homework assignment on Islam.

In one assignment, students were asked to list the five tenets of Islam required for salvation, reported KWTX-TV in Waco, Texas.

“It’s just they’ve taken God and other things out of the schools but yet they’re going to push this in there secretly to me and I don’t think it’s right,” the mother said.

In late March, as WND reported, a middle school in Chatham, New Jersey, was using a cartoon video to teach the Five Pillars of Islam to seventh-grade students, prompting two parents to obtain legal services to fight the school district, which has ignored their concerns.

Seventh graders in this school are taught: “May God help us all find the true faith, Islam.”

Also taught in the video is the Shahada, which is the Muslim prayer of conversion “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”
The parents say no other religion is taught nearly to this level of detail in the “world cultures and geography” class.

WND also reported in March a high school in Frisco, Texas, has set up an Islamic prayer room specifically for Muslim students to pray on campus during school hours. The same type of prayer rooms have been set up in high schools in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and other school districts.

In 2015, parents in Tennessee asked the governor, legislature and state education department to investigate pro-Islam bias in textbooks and other materials.

A complaint by the group Proclaiming Justice to The Nations said a presentation on Islam included “multiple misleading statements including the glorification of jihad against infidels as a reason why many easily convert to Islam.”

It also featured the Shahada, the Muslim prayer of faith, and “mentions nothing about the historically negative aspects and actions of the religion, including the 9/11 attacks.”

‘Historical revisionism’

WND reported in 2012 ACT for America conducted an analysis of 38 textbooks used in the sixth through 12th grades in public schools and found that since the 1990s, discussions of Islam are taking up more and more pages, while the space devoted to Judaism and Christianity has simultaneously decreased.

“Drop Christianity down the memory hole but give extensive and mostly favorable coverage to Islam,” she wrote. “Even the mainstream media have provided extensive coverage of the steady stream of court cases and threatening letters from the American Civil Liberties Union aimed at removing all signs of Judeo-Christianity from public schools.”

Textbooks, she said, “generally give a false description of women’s rights under Islam.”

“The books don’t reveal that women are subject to polygamy, a husband’s legal right to beat her, genital mutilation and the scandalous practice misnamed ‘honor killings,’ which allows a man to murder a daughter who dares to date a Christian,” she said.

“Slavery is usually a favorite topic for the liberals, but historical revisionism is particularly evident in the failure to mention the Islamic slave trade. It began nearly eight centuries before the European-operated Atlantic slave trade and continues in some Muslim areas even today.”

In 2009, Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, a group that reviews history books, told Fox News the texts were sugarcoating Islamic extremism.

Sewall said publishers have downplayed Islamic connections with terrorism.

“The picture is incomplete … and the reason for this is that publishers are afraid of the Islamist activists. They don’t want trouble,” he said.

Sewall noted the text “World History: The Modern World,” published by Pearson Prentice Hall, doesn’t mention the religion of the 9/11 hijackers, simply calling them a “teams of terrorists.”

Jihad about ‘funding medical research’?

Also in 2009, WND reported the middle school textbook “History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond,” published by Teachers’ Curriculum Institute, said an Islamic “jihad” is an effort by Muslims to convince “others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research.”

And even at its most violent, “jihad” simply is Muslims fighting “to protect themselves from those who would do them harm,” says the book.

A parent whose child has been handed the text in a Sacramento-area district said at the time in a letter to WND noted that seven of the book’s chapters deal with Islam or Muslim subjects.

In 2006, WND reported a school in Oregon taught Islam by having students study and learn Muslim prayers and dress as Muslims. A parent told WND her 13-year-old son was being “indoctrinated that Islam is a religion of peace, and being dressed up as a Muslim, being taught prayers, and scriptures out of the Quran.”

“I just don’t understand the ban on Christianity but Islam has free rein,” she said.

WND reported in 2003 a prominent Muslim leader who eventually was convicted on terror-related charges helped write the “Religious Expression in Public Schools” guidelines issued by President Clinton during his tenure in office.

Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was president of the American Muslim Council and a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, worked with President Clinton and the American Civil Liberties Union when the guidelines that later were used by a federal judge to conclude such teaching was legal were compiled.

The school, Excelsior, used a textbook that omitted information about Islam conquest and cruelties against Christians and Jews. Christianity was mentioned only briefly and negatively, linked to the Inquisition and to Salem witch hunts.

The students were given Muslim names and told to recite Muslim prayers in class. They were required to recognize the Islamic practice of Ramadan by giving up something for a day, and the teacher gave extra credit for fasting at lunch.

For the final exam, the students had to write an essay about Islamic culture. The essay assignment warned students: “Be careful here; if you do not have something positive to say, don’t say anything!!!”

Parents went to court to uphold their right to reject the class for their children, but a federal just ruled against them, and in 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider their appeal.